How to review this book? The idea is certainly true -- or at least deeply resonant with me at the moment. We as a culture have become addicted to illusion and spectacle. Prominent examples from the book include professional wrestling, porn, and our obsession with celebrities. We are surrounded by distraction -- TVs everywhere blaring a 24-hour fluff news cycle and somehow no programs of substance, twitters and Facebook statuses on constant rolling feeds, all in 140 characters or less, all of us chained to this stream of entertainment and pseudo-news, and who has time to read a book? Who has time to think deeply about any one particular issue? How easily those with a different script are dismissed as doomsdayers, naysayers, future-fearing Luddites, so they can be erased from view and replaced with someone who will move more product.

Corporations are running the world. All so subtly it's like we didn't even know it was happening. It's not a monopoly if it's five companies controlling every thing we read, hear, watch, and surf, right? Never mind they all have the exact same interests at heart -- profit, advertising, the commodification of the audience: us. It's still a democracy if we have so many choices, right? But now strange all those voices sound the same on the issues important to the deep pockets required to make those voices loud enough for us to hear in the first place.

This is a bleak world view. As it goes on it gets clearer and clearer just why that shiny world of glitz is so much more attractive than reality. But then just when I was ready to give way to despair, Hedges won me back with one very simple promise: love wins. I emerged from the other side of this book even more deeply convicted of the importance of manifesting my crazy liberal theology. We'll see how that goes. ( )

A depressing but hard-hitting look at the dumbing-down and commercialization of American society. Well-written if a bit too earnest (would it have killed the author to have a bit of fun with some of this... ala Freakonomics?!) , this is a sobering look at future generations in the US and the world. ( )

Hedges vents his considerable anger with America's cultural and intellectual decline, and the penchant for most of our fellow citizens to choose the comforts of distraction and delusion over confronting the challenges of reality. I share his disillusionment. ( )

"Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, armies of corporate lobbyists grease the palms of our elected officials, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia, and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he likes us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, this product is duping us into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.

What, for all our faith and hope, has the Obama brand given us? His administration has spent, lent, or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer dollars to Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to re-inflate the bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls catastrophe and will leave us broke in a time of profound crisis. Brand Obama has allocated nearly $1 trillion in defense-related spending and the continuation of our doomed imperial projects in Iraq, where military planners now estimate that 70,000 troops will remain for the next fifteen to twenty years. Brand Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan, increasing the use of drones sent on cross-border bombinb runs into Pakistan, which have doubled the number of civilians killed over the past three months. Brand Obama has refused to east restrictions so workers can organize and will not consider single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans. And Brand Obama will not prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, including the use of torture, and has refused to dismantle Bush's secrecy laws and restore habeas corpus."( )

While Hedges isn't the first to posit that the biggest threat to America is Americans .. his may be the most compelling argument yet. .. Citing everyone from Socrates to Steinem, Hedges manages to ratchet up the terror factor by several degrees per chapter so that, by the end, the reader is at least exhausted, if not completely defeated.

Wikipedia in English (3)

Chris Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: one, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world, able to cope with complexity and to separate illusion from truth. The other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. In this "other society," comforting, reassuring images, fantasies, slogans and a celebration of violence push reality, complexity and nuance to the margins. The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip and trivia. These are the debauched revels of a dying culture.--From publisher description.… (more)